This Old House

A place for us to track the progress on our house and to share it with friends and family.

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A little late in posting this, but this was closing day!  we had the whole family at the house for a little pizza.  it was nice.  

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Last Sunday (5/4) was a big day. The above photos are the before and after shots for the day (6am when I got there and 1pm when we left).  My Friend Bryan came over to help and things moved a lot faster than the previous weekend (as you can see from the photos).  I tried to do the time lapse again, and although I turned on the timer, I forgot to turn on the camera for about 4 hours of the work... Big bummer because this would have been a way cooler one than the last one.  But good before/after shots for sure :) 

We get to see wood samples from the cabinet maker this week, and the kitchen designs from the drafter are about 90% done.  

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This was my Saturday.

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SOLD!

The house is ours!  We are very excited and ready to get our hands dirty.  A big trash bin gets delivered to the house today, and the week plans are to start demolishing the kitchen and main bathroom.  I think we are going to be sore on Monday :)

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Once again, we still don't own the house, and thank goodness - a tree from the backyard fell into the neighbors yard on Saturday.  It took out a bunch of fence and created quite a nuisance for the neighbor.  Thankfully, this is the sellers problem and they will be removing the tree and fixing the fence before closing.  

Side note, we are not sad about loosing the tree as we had decided it needed to go already since it was leaning in a funny way and generally looked dead.  Turns out we were right, just makes our lives a little easier that will be done for us!  

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We don't own the house yet, but the activity has started - the seller agreed to put in a new sewer line before we moved in.  We thought they were going to dig a whole at the street and pull the new line through the exiting hole from the existing sewer -- we were wrong!

They trenched from the house all the way to the street - nearly 10 ft down because they had to get to the line that was below basement.  One of the many issues with the sewer was that it was not installed with the appropriate pitch so gravity wasn't pulling the water into the city lines correctly.  This meant a really big hole!  

Really happy this is getting done before we move in.  

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We are working to close on purchasing this house.  We are really excited, but we also know that we have a lot of work ahead of us.  This is an old house and it needs a lot of work, but it is a beautiful house in an amazing neighborhood and on a very pretty and friendly street.  This blog is meant to be a place where we can document the excitement and unplanned challenges that will make up the next 6-12 months of building our home. 

Some interesting facts we have learned in the process of buying this house and investigating the permit process for some of the repairs:

We are the first to buy this house!  The builder gave it to his son, who passed it to his niece when he died.  We are purchasing it from his niece.  

It has been a rental for the last 10 years and has the reputation for being the party house in the neighborhood.